1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing control apparatus for managing a plurality of image forming apparatuses, a printing control method, and a program.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a system for managing an image forming apparatus, a shift to thin client has also been accelerated in an office environment to enhance internal control and security and reduce personal computer (PC) management cost. The shift to thin client has progressed such that web services for performing processing on the side of a server have been provided one after another.
One of their service forms is a web portal. The web portal can aggregate various services and display the aggregated services on one screen. Each service managed and displayed by the portal is referred to as a portlet.
By the portlet, news, an electronic mail, document management and print services, and so on can be provided.
Each of functions is serviced so that a plurality of services can be used on one screen at the same time on a web browser. However, the services do not cooperate corporate with one another because they are independent services.
Therefore, there is no means for immediately printing a document provided by a document management service. A user is to select, out of printers in the print service, the printer currently usable and give a print instruction to perform printing.
In order to solve this problem, means for an image forming apparatus to confirm updating of a document on a document management service and perform printing has been proposed (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-317169).
When the image forming apparatus confirms updating of the document on the document management service and performs printing, however, the printing is always performed only in the image forming apparatus. Therefore, printing may not be performed, depending on a status of the image forming apparatus. Thus, convenience is not improved.